Stellar Resturant Solutions

Stellar Restaurant Solutions provides a call-center-based delivery and take-out ordering service for restaurants across the country. Ever order take out from a restaurant? Most of the time you're talking to the bartender or the hostess. It's really loud and you can't hear them (and they can't hear you). The error rate is huge. They forget to offer you the specials of the day. They don't even know the menu that well. Now, enter Stellar. Every call is taken by a trained agent in a controlled environment. The agent takes the order, answers questions, and up-sells the customer on everything from sliced avocadoes to hot fudge sundaes. Guess what, the average check goes up...way up! That's the Stellar way.

Once upon a time, Stellar was for McDonald's drive through lanes. An idea hatched in the brain of Steve Bigari.

I3CMS in Action (from The Box You Got, by Steve Bigari)


The most sophisticated drive-thru order system in the world operates just outside my office door. During my years at McDonald’s, I was continually frustrated by the performance of my drive-thru lanes. They accounted for up to 75 percent of my restaurant revenue, and small mistakes can add up quickly. A four percent mistake rate is not uncommon. On top of that, for it to work right you need a dedicated drive-thru window order-taker. That person simply processes the orders. I started to think, “Why can’t I outsource that? What would I need?” I envisioned customers driving up to my McDonald’s stores and ordering through the traditional speaker box mounted on the menu board. Except in my dream, they were talking to someone in a call center thousands of miles away. In the call center, an operator would take the order, snap a digital picture of the customer’s car, and send both back to the local McDonald’s crew, who would prepare the food. As I worked through the system in my head, I knew that a system like this could reduce order time by up to one-third and increase the number of customers served by at least 10 to 15 percent. And I suspected it would slash our error rates and payroll costs. All of these assumptions proved true, and once we implemented the new call center idea, productivity went through the roof. This eventually led to the creation of Stellar Restaurant Solutions, and landed me on page 42 of Thomas Friedman's bestseller, "The World is Flat." (see, "Flat Burgers and Fries.)